Do not do business with Free. They lie to get your business, lose your payments, and, a year after I finally got free of them, sent me a threat via a hussier de justice demanding €540, with no justification for the charge. I'm still not sure if that's been cleared up. They lied to me, telling me that I didn't have to pay Orange, and so my phone kept going out because in fact I was supposed to pay Orange: my part of town didn't have the separation of lines. They also say they have English language help lines (I can't talk French worth beans on the phone), and they don't. Another lie. They are the least scrupulous businesspeople I've dealt with in a long, long time. Orange has been excellent: cheaper, friendlier, and with an excellent help line.
Thanks for all your replies. I have now done the deed. I was worried we'd be without the phone, and worse still the internet, for ages but we were sans phone for a few hours but the internet was OK, thus avoiding major withdrawal symptoms. This saves us 16 Euros a month plus we now get international calls free too. We've lost the 09 number but that's not a problem because I've no idea what it was anyway.
I recently went to the Orange shop with a livebox problem. The sales person tried to get me to cancel the FT sub saving me 15 E a month or thereabouts.
My thoughts were that as I was in the shop with a livebox problem, I would at home, also have been without a phone line at the same time. They did agree with me, so I decided that for now I will keep FT and see how the reliabilty of the livebox goes. In fairness to it, it's only the 3rd time in close to 3 years that I have had a problem with it and Orange do a good job of sorting it out, if you can be bothered to wait.
Me thinks its a pays your money takes your chance situation but unlike Andrew I was with SFR, when it was working fine, when it wasn't 1-3 weeks to sort it out always blaming FT. The helpline people rude and unhelpful and cost wise in the end no different to the FT package in reality.
Thanks Andrew, I think we get to keep both our numbers the 05 and the 09. I gather Free are ready to attack the French market and that should halve costs...
Hi Wendy, we've been with SFR for a couple of years without paying the france telecom sub - no problems at all here. Internet, phone, TV too, all unlimited and all for 32 euros a month ;-)
Phone numbers can be a bit odd when you're used to the local area codes but everyone seems to have got used to that now! (ours should be 05.65.63... instead its 05.81... you have to stop people before they start automatically writing the first 6 figure... not a real problem though ;-)